In our current world, globalization, technological progress and demographic change lead to changes in values and preferences on the labor market and spurred the evolution of what became known as Industry 4.0. Companies have realized that in order to stay competitive, they need to become much more flexible and agile to an increasingly complex and constantly changing envi-ronment strongly influenced by these three “megatrends” (Organization for Economic Coopera-tion and Development (OECD), 2017). Thus, they are continuously searching for process, product and organizational innovation (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2018, p. 21) and for employees who are capable of acting successfully under these conditions. In the light of digitalization and globalization, contact between individuals from all over the world and thus with different cultural backgrounds, intensifies. Multinational organiza-tions, earlier posting employees abroad as short- or medium-term experts, nowadays refrain from the concept of expatriates as it involves high costs for the sender organization (Clegg & Gray, 2002). Instead, digital media can be used in an organizational context to bridge distances and work across locations as multinational teams without the necessity of travelling or even living abroad. In a study survey with more than 1,500 respondents from 80 countries, 85% of the re-spondents reported being member of a “global virtual team” (RW3 CultureWizard, 2016, p. 3), emphasizing digitalization’s impact on the work environment. Furthermore, 48% of the respond-ents stated that more than half of their team members would be based outside their home coun-try (RW3 CultureWizard, 2016, p. 3). This suggests that team members often have differing cul-tural backgrounds. It is this cultural heterogeneity, which is perceived as the biggest hurdle to productive team functioning (RW3 Culture Wizard, 2016, p. 4). This points towards a misfit be-tween the skills necessary for effective job execution and the skills employees and graduates pos-sess. All in all, it seems that future work carries a challenge to collaborate in distributed interna-tional teams through technology enhanced collaboration scenarios while at the same time higher education might not be fit to equip graduates with the necessary skills to perform successful in these environments (Ehlers, forthcoming). Therefore, our research attempts to shed some light on the set of skills and competences future employees must be equipped with. Specifically, we ask: How do the megatrends identified above affect skill demand? Which factors have led to the skill gap? In addition, which skills are necessary for future graduates and employees to working effectively in this globalized, digitalized world? To address these questions, this paper aims to define a basic research framework, which iden-tifies factors that are underlying actors’ abilities to act successfully in distributed work environ-ments using technology for collaboration. Sources come from prior own and recent desk research of current state of the art research in the field. The framework will thus comprise those compe-tences, which in a digital and global collaboration culture have important influence on successful and effective work relations and task fulfillment. In a first step, we therefore need to a) identify scenarios for ‘digital global collaboration’ (DGC) (Chapter 2) , and b) suggest measures for ‘suc-cess’ and ‘effective task achievement’ in DGC (Chapter 2). In a second step, we c) analyze possible factors, elements of influence, as well as competences necessary for successful achievement (Chapter 3) and, finally, d) suggest relations between them and work out their interdependencies (Chapter 4). The latter will be done through the construction of a set of propositions, which re-lates the previously defined elements.